To my dearest, dearest transsexual family,
Remember the time you felt a moment of rest, a pause, your body relaxing just ever so much, noticed by you alone?
When, after years of a bolt stiff neck and spine, wary of the next stranger, leery of all those people claiming to be your friends, chary of your body, the hormones and surgeries and studied practicing of the gender of your need all conspired to make you the you were — for that moment at least — always desperate to be?
Did you relax a little more?
Did a piece of the armor fall away?
Did you cry?
Breath a second of relief?
This.
This is always what we’ve wanted. Our human right to relax into each moment of body’s living embrace of time passing.
This is the transsexual agenda: we want to exhale. We’ve too long been blue in the face, seeking permission to breathe.
Well done, I say.
We are very special, long of strength of will and patience.
How can anyone succeed who cannot wait?
We wait for permission to wear the clothes we want, for permission to be called by the name we desire and the pronouns we need, for permission to receive medical care, for permission to live free from humiliations and violence.
Waiting is our greatest super power. Come at us.
We will outlast all of you.
We seek to inhabit the here and now, free from the interruptions, the interrogations, the inquisitions, some of them life-threatening, brought about by a protrubering adams apple or globular, jingling breasts or a voice too low or one too high, a mincing walk or a barreling gait.
We seek the right to be forgotten in a crowd, to burrow deep down in a body that feels — finally after many years of waiting — like a friend.
In the newness of these moments, blossoming into a new us from an old gender, we have nothing left to fight about.
In this moment our bodies have become home.
We no longer living a short distance from our bodies.
We find ourselves not out there but in here.
Well done my beautiful tribe of Transsexual Waiters and Lurkers and Doers.
Inhale the moment when it first comes to you.
Exhale into your body.
It has been worth it. It will be worth it. Because you live and breath and fight, waiting until the right times arise.
Rejoice and be glad. We were never meant to survive.